Your Mind Is About To Be Blown: Mufasa And Scar Aren’t Actually Brothers In Disney’s ‘The Lion King’

Some movies will go down in history as our all-time favorites and we will watch them over and over again, but there is always something new to learn. One of the true Disney classics is The Lion King which is about to come out of the vault and will also be remade as a live-action film like many others. While fans await those, some news has recently come out that will blow your mind and change everything — Scar and Mufasa aren’t actually brothers.

As everyone should know by now, Mufasa, voiced by James Earl Jones, is the king of the pack in The Lion King, and his black sheep brother is Scar, voiced by Jeremy Irons. After a tragic incident in which Mufasa ends up dead, his son Simba must become king but Scar ends up scaring him off.

If you haven’t seen The Lion King, please let it be known that there are spoilers ahead. You may want to stop reading or you simply may want to watch the film as you should have by now.

The scene in question is one of the hardest to take as Scar pushes Mufasa off of a cliff which causes him to be trampled to death in a stampede. What makes that so hard to take is that it is Mufasa’s own brother who takes his life, but now, everything that we know has been taken away from us.

Hello Giggles dug into the 1994 animated classic as it is about to be released on DVD and Blu-ray on Aug. 29, and with that, they decided to get some more information on The Lion King. They interviewed director Rob Minkoff and producer Don Hahn about a number of things such as the success of the film and the incredible soundtrack.

At one point, they take a deeper look at Mufasa and Scar’s relationship which ends up being nothing like anyone thought. According to Hahn, there aren’t really “brothers” of lions out in the wild, and there’s a good reason for that, but it changes the movie.

“[While making the movie] we talked about the fact that it was very likely [Scar and Mufasa] would not have both the same parents. The way lions operate in the wild…when the male lion gets old, another rogue lion comes and kills the head of the pride. What that does is it causes the female lions to go into heat [to reproduce], and then the new younger lion kills the king and then he kills all the babies. Now he’s the new lion that’s running the pride.”

So, Scar just started hanging around the pride as Mufasa began to age and he was simply waiting for the king to die. This would have allowed him to take over for a while, but Simba would have risen up and killed him to take his official spot.

That is a much darker way of looking at things even though it is more realistic. It’s no real surprise that Disney didn’t go down that exact route. Scar did do a horrible deed in killing Mufasa and Simba came back to take his spot, but he let the hyenas do some of the final dirty work.

When it all comes down to it, Mufasa may refer to Scar as “brother,” but there is no real relation between the two.

For all eternity, The Lion King will go down as one of the best animated films, not just in Disney’s history, but for any studio. The live-action remake is going to set a new bar for things, but it’s going to be hard to top such an amazing movie. While this revelation of Scar and Mufasa not being brothers isn’t going to make it any less incredible, it certainly does change how we look at things and one of the most disturbing scenes in any cartoon ever.

[Featured Image by The Walt Disney Company]